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URBAN SPEED DEMONS
by Christopher Ketcham “I know each one of us in this life has asked themselves, `Black Star
of bitterness blooming inside my body, will you be able to take me all
the way?’ But for the cycle messenger there can only be one answer. There
really is no question. It is a necessity.”
Images from the life: At Connecticut and K in Washington, DC,
a banshee in spandex hangs on the hood of a swerving cab, beating out the
windshield with a U-lock.
In foul overcast December at New York City noon, a messenger’s
balls begin to freeze in his third hour on the road. Black waters
in potholes splash his crotch. Snow starts falling. Soon he
will be navigating piles of dirt ice that resemble the leavings of prehistoric
beasts.
You know the bike messenger if you’ve lived in the urban core or worked in any big city office: the wrap-around sun-glasses, the proud outlaw swagger, chain around the hips, two-way Motorola Iden strapped crackling to big messenger bag, the guy who thinks he’s the toughest, looniest cat around because he gets paid the fat bills to ride a bike fast through hell’s nine circles delivering the important packages for the important clients. You know these images, of the rebel and madman, the glamorous transgressor, the free man who laughs at slow humanity huddled under umbrellas at bus-stops. The bike messenger as urban legend, Hermes’ minion, the winged one. Refracted back on the urban landscape, they are as real as cardboard cut-outs. They are the sum of what messengers envision themselves to be and what the walking public would like them to be, what Hollywood gave us in the 80s with Kevin Bacon’s Quicksilver, what CBS told us with sleek brainrot dramas like Double Rush. More appropriate, perhaps, is the image of Bradley Minch, 20, a native Clevelander, crushed to death under eighty-thousand pounds of illegally-operating tractor trailer on Manhattan’s traffic-maddened 6th Avenue. Or that of a hundred riders standing in the fog on a moth-eaten pier throwing a bicycle into the oily waters off San Francisco’s China Basin. The bicycle hovers a minute, drowns. It belonged to Thomas Meredith, 26, whose head was smashed open by a passing bus. His brain swelled, and for a few days he held on. And if you’ve lived in the densest and darkest of urban cores, like New York City, you’ve seen the messenger’s actuality: a poor minority kid working for shit pay, frustrated, exhausted; an ex-con getting ripped off on his rates; a guy just off the boat from Guinea or Colombia who smiles when he receives a shorted check. Guys with families, paid piece-meal, riding 30 miles a day, working 10 hours straight and barely making minimum wage, with no sick days, vacation days, health benefits. At day’s end, their faces are covered with a light soot, their eyes are bloodshot and burning, and when they cough or sneeze, their phlegm is thick and dark. In all this, the messenger resembles most the sweatshop laborer of a century ago. No one really knows how many messengers are out there or how many get killed or hurt on the job. Since 1990, 201 cyclists have died on New York City streets. Last year, more than 4,000 cyclists were hit by automobiles. How many were messengers? Unknown. In New York it’s said there are about 6,000 messengers - equal to all the messengers in every other city across the nation - fueling an industry valued at some $700 million a year. It’s said that two, maybe three, get killed there every year, speeding critical documents for the city’s biggest advertisers, insurers, banks, modeling agencies, and law firms. As thanks, messengers are vilified, demonized and spat on by city government and citizens alike. I was one of them for a few months in the mid-90s, making three dollars a package, about $200 a week. I was, admittedly, a lazy rider, but it was a far cry from the glory days of the 80s, the salad days before the fax machine and e-mail, when the better riders took home $200 in a single eight-hour stretch, untaxed, working for fly-by-nights. But then came the recession of the early 90s, and a government crackdown on free-wheeling companies. Business constricted, competition intensified, wages deteriorated, and the hip, easy money was gone. I worked for one of the most notoriously exploitative of the New York companies, an operation called Eastside/Westside, which dispatched out of a filthy suite of cramped cubicles on 39th Street. On my fourteenth day, a brunette popped out of her Lexus slapping her
sharp door in my chest. This is called getting `doored’ and it is
a rite of passage. I was thrown, smacked my elbows and skinned my
hands. Called up the office to say I needed a rest.
In 1995, you didn’t need to call up a labor investigator, check the news morgue or run a court search to find the bad companies. You simply buttonholed the first ten messengers you saw, asked them if they liked their job, then asked them who they worked for. More than 80 percent of your interviews would have been with a poorly educated black or Latino, which makes New York a distinct demographic, because messengers in cities like Washington D.C. and San Francisco are mostly white, many of them well-educated. There was about a 20 percent chance your man would be on a prison work release program, and a 30 percent chance he’d be a recent immigrant. In age, he’d be anywhere from 16 to 45 years old, and in attitude he’d be resigned and tired and not really caring whether you exposed the bastards who were ‘exploiting’ him. Luckily, I had a chance at the time to talk with an insider, a 24-year-old ex-patriate from Liverpool, England, who was all for shoving it to his employers. He gave me the bird’s eye view of the shady dealings that typified companies like Eastside/Westside. A six-year messenger, dispatcher and then troubleshooter with a small New York firm, Conrad Allen had cherubic cheekbones and a crooked ironist’s smile. He delivered his indictments with an amused, thoroughly English detachment, as if there was no hope whatsoever for improving the messenger’s lot. The primary gripe, he told me, was rates. Officially, a messenger could make on average about three and a half dollars a run back then, more if he traveled far and fast. But it often didn’t add up that way. There are a lot of special trips - rushes, double-rushes, truck and oversize packages - that are daily carrots for a messenger. While a normal run should be completed in two hours, a rush pays double the regular rate for delivery in one; a double-rush pays triple the regular rate, but demands completion in half-an-hour. Any normal run that takes a messenger more than 20 blocks - about one city mile - brings a higher rate than the three dollar base; any run with a package weighing 15 pounds or more (a truck run) or with a very large package, say, three feet or longer (an oversize), also pays more. But high-volume clients often negotiated price reductions, and at Allen’s company more than half of the big clients didn’t pay the special rates. The messenger is not told this. Instead, the dispatcher cajoles him: “I’ll hook you up, I’ll hook you up. I’ve got three hot rushes just for you, cause yer the best!” And the messenger gets juiced for a wild run, races the red lights - thinking he’s getting the good money. It was all gossamer. At the end of the day, he received no commission sheet, no official tally. Just a list of addresses that he’d visited, and a gross take for the day. Bottom line is that he had no idea how much each run paid, and certainly no idea which were the double-rushes that got him the skinned knee, which the twenty pound truck jobs that gave him the backache. You can imagine him scratching his head in wonder. “Didn’t I do six rushes? Weren’t those worth $45 alone? Then why is my gross for the day only $28?” And you can imagine the dispatcher: “What are you talking about, guy? I hooked you up. And you’re complaining?” So dispatchers and management and guys like Allen lied to messengers as a matter of course. They lied with smiles. And if you were an immigrant or an ex-con or a kid who just dropped out of the 10th grade, you sucked it up. You’ve got a job, man. This is the good life. The guy on work release has more important things to worry about, like not going back to jail. The immigrant may not even have his papers straight. Take 41-year-old Rodrigo Gonzalez, a tiny man from Guatemala, who told
me through a thick accent: “I am beginning. I don’t have information
on how much I get paid for any run at this moment.” He shrugged.
He wasn’t angry. He hadn’t bothered to ask.
Allen wasn’t exaggerating. One courier told me he was canned because he took three days off for the birth of his daughter - even though he’d spent five years with the company. Another, a 30-year-old father of two boys, said he was fired the day after he got doored by a cabbie. “Insurance problems,” he said. Dealing with liars and cheats on a daily basis is taxing, to say the least. Dealing with an entire urban race - secretaries, mailroom attendants, dispatchers, doormen, pedestrians, cops, cabbies, motorists - that seems to hate your existence can be soul-destroying. For the messenger, it’s a matter of a hundred subtle slights every day. He’s harassed by building security because they think he’s a thief. A stink of old garbage runs through an office, and the secretary chimes in, “Even the messenger smells it, can you believe it?” “Once I was given 12 jobs in a row, all late,” recalled Allen, “and at one office the package was hours overdue. As I left, the client threw something hard at my back, and said, ‘You piece of shit! Why don’t you get on welfare like the rest of the niggers?’” Of 25 messengers I recently interviewed, only one had no complaints about the job. He was a white guy, a musician who’d been doing it a month. He kept talking about the `thrill ride.’ He’ll probably sing about it some day. I remember how bitterly Allen laughed when I asked him about this. “If you’re a guy who’s been messengering for five years and never got a paid vacation and never got a raise in percentage pay per job…and you got four kids by two different women and you’ve got child support docking your check and when your missus comes to your job - the kids need pampers, the kids want an ice cream cone, the kids want hundred dollar Air Jordans - it’s not a thrill to you anymore. Fuck the thrill. My kids need to be fed.” As a result, few riders last long. The courier industry in New York sustains some astonishing turn-over numbers, because messengers are constantly getting fired, quitting or splitting for the competition. Breakaway Courier Systems, known as one of the better companies, turned over more than 700 employees last year alone. At Allen’s company, an average eight messengers quit and another 12 were hired every month. This too differs New York’s messengers from those in almost any other American city. San Francisco’s small and stable circle of 300 riders forms a distinct community. They know each other. A majority are lifers, stakeholders, professionals who’ve stayed with the same company upwards of ten years. Some of them recently formed unions, the first ever in the history of the business. Back in 1994 and 1995, the Teamsters tried to unionize employees at four Manhattan companies. Stories of union-busting abounded. Immigrants were menaced with deportation; convicts on work release were told they’d go back to prison; some workers were threatened with beatings, murder. On the eve of the elections, a dispatcher at one company appeared with a wad of tens and twenties. Here boys. Take this. Remember where it came from. Vote no on the union. Which 89 guys did, countered by 89 who voted in favor. There were
a half-dozen contested ballots. It didn’t matter. In a report
issued a full year and a half later, the National Labor Relations Board
confirmed what everyone knew: The vote was a fraud.
In a fluid, shifting workforce of largely indifferent men, who’ve no real sense of fealty or design, who flit from company to company and then disappear altogether, there are few bonds beside the bottom dollar, few champions to spearhead change. “What’s the bike messenger ‘community’ like?” Allen told me. “It’s two guys smoking weed together. That’s not a very strong bond.” It’s the kind of bond you make when you have to bribe your dispatcher for runs. These friendly kickbacks took the form of cash, drugs, beer, food, to the extent of $40 to $50 a week. Such corruption was rampant, and not just in the back rooms. It was institutionalized in policy, in loan-sharking and illegal “service fees,” and it thrived on vulnerability, transience, ignorance and desperation. You need a radio or a pager to work here, kid. Oh, you don’t have one? It’ll cost you $15 a day. Your kids need new shoes and you ain’t got the money? Sure, here’s a hundred bucks. You owe me $120. A messenger needs vital repairs; he goes to a bike shop where the company has an account, where he can charge shoulder-bags, patch kits, pumps, tubes, rims. (He provides his own bike, of course.) That was a $50 repair, he’s told. You owe us $70. He takes off work because it’s sleeting or he’s down with flu or his mother has died. You missed Monday and Tuesday because of the blizzard? Well, we’re going to dock you ten percent of your gross for the week. “These guys are violating labor laws on a daily basis,” Joel Lefevre, secretary-treasurer of Manhattan Teamsters Local 840, told me at the time. “Nearly half the industry does not carry workman’s compensation insurance,” Lefevre said. “The industry earns hundreds of millions of dollars without any scrutiny or regulation as to methods or responsibility. There is no regular licensing system of employers requiring adherence to any safety standards for employees.” Implicated in all this, he said, are the multimillion-dollar clientele who depend on the messenger industry. “The securities, banking, insurance, fashion, legal and accounting industries, along with their Fortune 500 clients in New York, have gone into the wholesale discrimination business.”
That was 1995. The hype today is that everything has changed, that, as the New York Times gushed last December, messengers are enjoying a “renaissance,” that they’re better paid and better trained than “ever before,” that Internet dynamism and Wall Street money have normalized the industry. Over the past five years, major publicly-traded corporations - $200 million giants like Consolidated Delivery & Logistics, Dispatch Management Services, and Dynamex, the largest - have been feasting on small private shops, buying up dozens nationwide. In the process, observers say, they’ve brought the industry out of the jungle, because their operations are answerable to an arm of the federal government, the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the same time, Internet commerce has exploded, energizing the courier industry, and dot.com pioneers like Kozmo and Urbanfetch, with their online promise of one-hour delivery of everything from candy bars to CD players, frantically grab up the best riders - outfitting them, as the Times ridiculously notes, in very colorful and pretty costumes, as comely as those on the boys at Fed-Ex. Luke Howell, a 15-year New York vet, has nothing but good things to say. He enjoyed the rush of quick cash in the late 80s, persevered through the fax and e-mail onslaught, suffered through the lies and swindles of the mid-90s. And now he’s riding high, legitimately. “The Internet has transformed the industry,” enthuses Howell. He says he’ll make some $45,000 by the end of 2000 - triple his 1995 gross - working days as a traditional courier and nights as a Kozmo e-liverer. Howell is a professional, and he’s getting treated like one. He’s got a retirement plan and contributory health insurance. “There are no more bad guys,” he tells me. “Everything’s according to
plan now.”
The roads haven’t changed. Last year, a bike messenger in Chicago was murdered by the driver of an SUV, who intentionally and repeatedly ran him over. A courier in Ottawa was stabbed by a motorist. A record 35 cyclists were killed in New York City. At least 6 may have been messengers. The demographic hasn’t changed. Of the two dozen messengers I
spoke with, almost every one was black or Latino. Eight were just
out of jail. More than half were immigrants, men from Ivory Coast,
Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados, Nicaragua, Colombia.
“There are always good companies and bad companies in every city,” offers
Andrew Brady, the affable head of King Courier in San Francisco. “You can’t
change the bad companies. They are an evil that needs to exist. The
guys who are still smoking crack need that bad company. It’s their
apprenticeship. You start out as a shitty messenger, work for a shitty
company. You become a good messenger, move on to a good company.”
For who are the crackheads? Is Albha Diallo, 31, from Guinea, Africa, a crackhead, a shitty messenger? I ask Diallo who he works for. “Dynamex,” he says proudly. “Good place.” He’s been in the U.S. for four months, and two of those have been with Dynamex, the new clean corporate player. “How much do you make a run?” “Don’t know,” he says, still smiling. “It’s alright, though. I do good. Dynamex-Eastside/Westside, my company.” I look at him. Eastside/Westside? I was told they went out of business. Later I do a little research. Of course. It all makes sense. Dynamex bought Eastside/Westside back in late 1997.
Alex from Senegal, a handsome man with sad eyes, has just delivered a two-dollar package to 1345 Avenue of the Americas, 40-odd gleaming stories in Midtown, and now he’s sitting in the spring sun murmuring into a two-way radio that he needs another run now, right now. He tells me he’s trying to get a degree in statistics and it’s time to pay the tuition. I think of statistics. The tall glass tower behind him houses Avon Products, valued on Wall Street at $6.7 billion; branch offices of Salomon Smith Barney and Travelers Group, subsidiaries of Citigroup, which had $10 billion in profits last year; securities giant Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which made $4.8 billion last year; and Oppenheimer Capital, which manages $35 billion in assets. “The clients pay the companies well,” Alex says. “And the
companies pay us bad. Every payroll they steal your money.
This isn’t a life. I go home soon, home to Senegal.”
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